Sunday, June 29, 2014

LET'S TALK ABOUT STUFF.

LET'S TALK
ABOUT STUFF.Stuff, to me,
is different things.Could be politics,
music, religion, memories...a whole bunch of things.As an example, the other evening we watched a
DVD of Guys And Dolls, and it took me back a long, long way.I grew up in Brooklyn,
back when it was worth your life, or a limb at the very least, to go into a
neighborhood that wasn't yours.As a
matter of fact, it was when I got a bicycle chain wrapped around my head by a
kid that was smaller than me, that my mother said "that's it...we're
moving", and we moved to Florida.Wow, talk about a culture shock!I got a driver's license at 14 and when my
father and I visited Brooklyn I was king of
the hill.That's a good memory.New
York City was never going to be Pleasantville...it's
just too vibrant, but there was a time when it was better than it is now.It wasn't unusual to go to a friend's house
and open the door and walk in, because a lot of doors weren't locked.The parks were places you went to play ball,
row a canoe, visit the animals in the zoo and, if you were lucky, eat something
that your folks brought for the picnic.Yeah, we had ants back then too...it wasn't all paradise...but it was
better than it is now.My father and I
used to go to Times Square every Sunday and we
would pick out a movie from one of the seven or eight that were in that
immediate area.I remember seeing
vaudeville at the Loews State, with acts like Gallagher and Sheen, and I
heard Frank Sinatra at the Paramount.Yeah, I'm old, but in my time all the big
ones were just coming along, and it was my privilege to see and hear them.There was Gargantua the ape at the circus,
the tiglon at the Bronx Zoo, and if the weather was right, we'd go to Coney
Island and ride the steeplechase horses at Luna Park,
have hot dogs from Nathan's and hot buttered corn.Those are good memories.

For me, "the war" was World
War 2, even though I served after it, and during Korea, because that was the era in which
the world was the most dangerous...and reading the headlines in the paper
alternately made my family happy or scared, depending upon the news.We had a map of the world that covered nearly
a whole wall in our living room and we knew where the war was going good for
the allies, and where it wasn’t.There
wasn’t a real fear that America
could be bombed, but it might be invaded, and that was almost a daily
discussion.I had a pal that had a .22
rifle and we’d go to a vacant lot and shoot bottles…I got pretty good with it,
but nobody was shooting back at us then.During the war you couldn’t go a block without seeing a flag flying, or,
if you looked in a window you might see a small pennant with a blue star…or a
gold one.There was so much patriotism
it was easy to get caught up in it.We
would scour neighborhoods for glass bottles, or any sort of aluminum pots or
pans, or any metal at all.Rubber tires
were especially prized, and we thought seriously about taking them right off
cars, but we got a lecture about that, and didn’t do it.

The music of that era was, I think,
better.You could understand the words
to the songs, none of them had cursing in them and many were patriotic in their
message.There was “Coming In On A Wing
And A Prayer”…”Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition” and “When Johnny Comes
Marching Home Again” along with many others, and some songs that carried over
from The Great War in the 19-teens.One
of my favorites was “Lili Marlene” even though it was a German song.We felt bad when Glenn Miller
disappeared.We were deeply moved by the
reports from London
by Edward R Murrow, and Drew Pearson was an oddball at the time.Walter Winchell spoke to “all the ships at
sea” and at some time, Ernest Hemingway moved to Key West.I lost a nice guy cousin when his B-24 was shot down returning from a
raid in Ploesti,
Romania.The world had never seen the magnitude of the
military might that the United
States amassed, to free, and arm, the
world.It was said that, during the
raids on the German homeland, there were thousands of American aircraft in the
sky.That was some stuff then and,
speaking of stuff…do you remember the stuff that dreams are made of?I do.I have a Maltese Falcon looking down at me from just above my monitor’s
screen.